Guitars, Apps and Gear for the Discerning Guitarist

10 Essential Guitar Apps – November 2014. Number 10 – Audiobus

I remember reading an interview last year with the actor playing Q in the last Bond film and he was talking about how the director wanted to move away from all those cheesy gadgets because “there is far more technology now in the phone in your pocket than Bond ever had to play with”. Think about that, think about the raw power of your Iphone and Ipad and think about how it’s changed how you approach technology as a guitarist.

Over the next few days I’ll be looking at what I think are the 10 most essential apps for the guitarist. It is my view and not a scientific survey. And it’s Apple only I’m afraid. Until Google get their arse into gear over latency, the field still totally belongs to Apple.

My first choice is not an ampsim, a DAW or even an effect. It’s Audiobus and it is the one app that totally revolutionised iOS as a music platform and turned your Iphone and Ipad from a toy to a serious musicians tool.

Before Audiobus you could play a synth or a guitar through an ampsim, but you could not really do anything with the noise you made. Heroic attempts were made to link apps together through cobbled together MIDI networks, but at best it was clumsy and mostly it did not work at all. Audiobus changed all that – now you simply dropped in your compatible apps and they automatically talked to each other. You could now route your guitar signal through separate effects, or the effects of one ampsim, into the amp section of another, into a recorder or a looper, or whatever. And Audiobus has been developed and refined so that it’s capabilities keep on building. And it’s beautiful and it is so simple and intuitive to use.

It is perhaps the key musical app on the platform and any musician, no matter what they play or how they play, will benefit from it.